• Career villain Javier Bardem has been offered the lead baddie role of the pirate Blackbeard in Peter Pan origin story Pan for Warner Bros. The tale follows an orphan through Neverland, where he becomes the savior of the natives and fights against the pirates. [Deadline]

• Imogen Poots, who stars alongside Aaron Paul in the upcoming Need for Speed, has joined the cast of Beautiful Ruins, an adaptation of Jess Walter’s bestselling novel about an American actress in Italy for the Cleopatra shoot, a development assistant in present day Los Angeles, and a producer who started on the set of Cleopatra. Todd Field (Little Children) is directing the adaptation. Poots has a number of films in various stages of post production including That Awkward Moment, Knight of Cups, and Squirrels to the Nuts. [Variety]

• Girls star Adam Driver will co-star with Alba Rohrwacher (I am Love) in Hungry Heats. They’ll play a New York couple with a seemingly perfect life – until they find out that their lives are in danger. Italian director Saverio Costanzo (Private) is directing. Driver can be seen next in the Coen brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis (out Dec. 20). [Deadline]

• Tika Sumpter (Salt) will play singer Yvonne Fair in the Tate Taylor-directed James Brown biopic Get On Up, starring 42’sChadwick Boseman as Brown. [Deadline]

• Callan McAuliffe, who played a younger Leonardo DiCaprio in The Great Gatsby, has been cast in Skateboarding with Saddam about an American teenager in Tel Aviv. Daniel Lir and Bayou Bennett-Lir are writing and directing the coming-of-age drama. [Variety]

• Bryan Greenberg (How To Make It In America) will play a man trying to reinvent himself after falling off a roof on New Year’s in A Year and Change from director R. Stephen Seuttinger, who’s making his feature film debut on the project. [Deadline]